On my bookshelf
State Fair
Amazon.com
"I've got that nice, tired old feeling," says Pa Frake near the end of the gentle, sunny 1945 film, State Fair. The Rodgers and Hammerstein music, commissioned while Oklahoma was still making musical-theater history, feels tired too, like the result of a hastily written score. The state of Iowa just can't seem to inspire the same quality music as its more memorable, southern cousin. Remember that State Fair gem "All I Owe Iowa"? Still, it is R and H, and "It Might as Well Be Spring" is here as well as some other decent ditties. There's a country-mouse feeling as the Frake family journeys to the big city for the annual harvest celebration. Young daughter Margy (Jeanne Crain) has her eye on something more exciting than her bore of a fiancé, while her brother meets a lovely big-band singer with a secret. But the bucolic, Old Farmer's Almanac feel is genuine, and it's most obviously a picture of a bygone era when someone expostulates gleefully, "You're gonna be the wife of a journalist!" Not a "don't miss" but not a dismiss either. The DVD features include a vintage trailer for the film and production notes, which do add to the experience. --Keith Simanton
People Will Talk
Reviewer: A viewer
In the late forties, Mankiewicz was on a role with The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, A Letter to Three Wives, rolling right into the fifties with All About Eve and People Will Talk. Unfortunately Eve seems to get all the glory these days. People Will Talk is remarkably up to date. Cary Grant's character, Dr. Praetorius, believes "that knowledge of the human emotions and spirit is as necessary for a medical person as anatomy." Jeanne Crain plays an unwed pregnant student that Grant saves from suicide and despair. The supporting cast includes some of the greatest character actors of all time including Hume Cronyn, Sidney Blackmer, Walter Slezak, Finley Currie, and in a delightfully funny bit Margaret Hamilton. Currie's performance as Grant's faithful assistant/friend is wonderfully under played. One of my favorite moments is the porch scene with Grant, Crain, and Blackmer, with Crain shouting "Bella" at the top of her lungs. You'll have to see the film to enjoy the above commentary. People Will Talk is a delightful film that was way ahead of its time in 1951, and in many ways it still is today. --This text refers to the VHS Tape edition
Pinky
Amazon.com essential video
It used to be called "miscegenation," and it hasn't been a scandalous or taboo subject for several decades now. (Every other prime-time TV series seems to have an interracial romance going, and nobody bats an eyelash.) These welcome social changes have stranded Elia Kazan's 1949 weepie about a light-skinned African American woman (played less than convincingly by lily-white Jeanne Crain) who tries to "pass"---and falls in love with a white man. Director Douglas Sirk mined similar territory, and got a lot more juice out of it, in Imitation of Life. To his credit, perhaps, the director of On the Waterfront just doesn't have cheap soapsuds in his blood, and he makes the fatal mistake of taking a solemn and high-minded approach to this overheated material. The picture isn't even a hoot. Ethel Waters is the aunt who raises Pinky, while concealing her true lineage; it's a strong performance with a simmering subtext of anger. David Chute
Cheaper by the Dozen
Amazon.com essential video
Though it's impossible to gauge just how much of it is true, this endearing family comedy (based on the book by their children Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey) is inspired by the true story of the husband-and-wife efficiency experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and their adventures raising 12 kids at the turn of the century. Director Walter Lang takes a loping pace through the episodes of family life: the kids descend upon the new school in force while Dad (fussy Clifton Webb) offers his unsolicited views on education; Dad takes his oldest daughter (wholesome Jeanne Crain) to the school dance and becomes the hit of the ball; a mass tonsillectomy becomes an opportunity to document the ordeal as an experiment in efficiency. Myrna Loy almost steals the film in her one standout scene, holding back a smirk while a birth-control advocate (played by Mildred Natwick) solicits this mother of 12 to speak at a rally, but her martini-dry comic deadpan is criminally underused in this picture, which is dominated by Webb's stern, military-like parenting and Crain's adolescent crises. Though this sometimes overly sentimental classic never builds to any real dramatic plateau or comic highlights, it maintains an even tone of good humor and warmth throughout, capturing a bygone era through the travails of a loving family. A charming sequel, Belles on Their Toes, followed two years later. --Sean Axmaker
A Letter to Three Wives
Amazon.com essential video
Before he made the classic All About Eve, writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz made this clever story about three wives who spend an afternoon at a children's picnic mulling over a letter all three had just received, from a woman who says she's just run off with one of their husbands. As the wives--a former farm girl (Jeanne Crain), a radio soap opera writer (Ann Sothern), and a social climber from the wrong side of the tracks (Linda Darnell)--mull over the troubles of their marriages, each begins to think that she's the one left behind. A Letter to Three Wives doesn't have the crackling show-biz milieu of Eve, but it has the same mix of snappy dialogue and topnotch performances. The tone ranges from florid sentiment to unblinking cynicism, yet Mankiewicz holds it all together with smooth, witty direction. Also featuring Kirk Douglas and the great character actress Thelma Ritter. --Bret Fetzer
Jeanne Crain starred in a lot of movies from the forties to the sixties. These are just a few of my favorites. If I had to choose one Jeanne Crain movie, it would have to be A Letter to Three Wives.
Elmer Batters fetish books
All text (unless noted above) copyright J. W. Turner, 1997-Present. All rights reserved.